Philip Roth has been firmly ensconced in America’s literary pantheon for over fifty years. In her new book, Roth Unbound: The Writer and His Books, New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us an excellent survey of Roth’s life and work. Read my review here.
Snowden, ‘Animal Farm’ and the End of Privacy | Nov 14, 2013
Over the past few months, millions of Americans have discovered that their government is willing and able to spy on them as well as on the populations of other countries. This comes as a surprise to many.
For the nearly 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the majority of Americans have enjoyed strong legal supports of our civil liberties. We have lived with Constitutional amendments and legal requirements for due process designed to bar or at least curtail undue search, seizure, surveillance and other intrusions on our persons, property and privacy. These rights were perceived as congruent with our most basic tenet, that we are all equal, that no one has the right to intercept our emails, or invade our privacy other than with a legally obtained warrant, obtainable only after establishing probable cause. Many of us had come to believe that these protections were ironclad and non-negotiable.
But at some point unnoticed, or simply obscured by the fog of over a dozen years of the War on Terror, the rules changed. Our confidence that we enjoy inalienable rights to privacy is evaporating. Although every once and a while we are made aware of secret executive orders, directives and programs that delimit our civil liberties, it’s still unclear how we lost so much so fast. Continue reading “Snowden, ‘Animal Farm’ and the End of Privacy | Nov 14, 2013”
Review of Steven Millhauser’s Story Collection ‘We Others’ for The Globe & Mail | Sep 7, 2011
Steven Millhauser is a master at creating fantastic and enchanting stories task management tool. His novels and stories are often preoccupied with oddities: circuses and carnivals, sideshows, nickelodeons, magicians, and builders of automata, zoetropes and other animating and esoteric technologies. Read my review of his short story collection We Others here.
Review of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life’ for The Common Review | Mar 20, 2010
Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life is the third installment of J.M. Coetzee’s memoirs, following on Boyhood (1998) and Youth (2002). Summertime pursues further the themes touched on in these earlier volumes: maturation, solitude and alienation, family dynamics, the outsider and the artist in society, South African politics, racism, sex, ideas of home and homeland, and exile. Taken together, the books offer a multivolume portrait of the artist.
They follow an arc across decades from Coetzee’s boyhood in the 1940s and 1950s through his maturity in the 1970s. Over this period he struggles to define himself as an individual, tries to make his way in the world, pursues grand literary ambitions, tallies up unsatisfying love affairs, makes compromises, and suffers humiliations and setbacks. A complex, enigmatic, and creative human being emerges in Coetzee’s own account. Continue reading “Review of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life’ for The Common Review | Mar 20, 2010”
Review of ‘Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters’ for The Georgia Review | Jan 30, 2010
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg met at Columbia University in 1944. Thereafter, they kept in contact through an urgent, almost frenzied exchange of letters. Among the distinguishing features of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, is that two-thirds of the 182 letters gathered here have never been published before. Continue reading “Review of ‘Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters’ for The Georgia Review | Jan 30, 2010”
Review of Thomas Trofimuk’s novel ‘Waiting for Columbus’ for The Globe & Mail | Aug 28, 2009
Late in Thomas Trofimuk’s novel, Waiting for Columbus, one of the main characters, a psychiatric nurse named Consuela Lopez, notices a group of patients where she works at the Sevilla Institute for the Mentally Ill, in Spain, working together to solve a puzzle: “There is a small gaggle of puzzlers across the room, patiently placing puzzle pieces, rotating, trying again and again to make the picture complete.” Read my review of Waiting for Columbus here.
Review of Mohsin Hamid’s novel ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ for The Globe & Mail | Apr 14, 2007
Novels are uniquely suited to depict the complexities of mind and motivation behind events such as 9/11: John Updike, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and a few others have set their sights on the personal perspective in a post-9/11 world. We should now add to this growing list of ambitious writers the lesser-known, but very talented Mohsin Hamid. Read my review of his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist here.
Review of ‘Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing’ for The Globe & Mail | Feb 11, 2006
Being black in North America in general, and in Canada specifically, is a confounding experience. Literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse’s book, Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing, explores the struggle to fit into contemporary Canadian society and create new, individuated identities. Read my review here.
Review of Tricia Wastvedt’s novel ‘The River’ for The Globe & Mail | Jun 26, 2004
A boy and a girl in a rowboat drift away from a riverbank in the Devon, England, village of Cameldip in 1958. They intend to go on a short adventure, but soon find themselves adrift, and they drown when the boat founders. For the next 30 years, their parents, Isabel and Robert MacKinnon, live in a grief-stricken purgatory. Read my review of Tricia Wastvedt’s first novel, The River, here.
Review of ‘The Swallows of Kabul’ for The Globe & Mail | Apr 3, 2004
If you’re in the habit of judging books by their covers, as I often am, the small size, flowery, impressionistic title and pastel-hued dust jacket of the hardcover edition of The Swallows of Kabul is terribly misleading. Held in hand, the book feels airy and insubstantial, but inside is a riveting story of terror and redemption, told with haunting power and captivating grace. Read my review here.